🤥 Faked Up #7

YouTube goes Birdwatching | America's collateral damage | There are no AI candidates

Happy Wednesday.

Faked Up #7 is brought to you by tortoise lies and sloppily stolen satire. The newsletter is a ~7-minute read and contains 65 links.

Photo by Diego F. Parra

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YOUTUBE GOES BIRDWATCHING

I was probably the Google employee who tweeted the most about Birdwatch¹, X’s 3-year-old feature that appends crowdsourced corrections to tweets. So I’m not going to lie, I’m a little peeved that YouTube waited for my departure to copy the feature and launch Viewer Notes.

But this is not about me. This is about YouTube users who, according to the company’s mocks, will NO LONGER BE MISLED ABOUT GIANT TORTOISES!

Just kidding, this is obviously part of YouTube's strategy to prepare for the US 2024 election following its partial rollback of election denialism policies.

YouTube’s Notes are remarkably similar to X’s, all the way down to a “bridging algorithm” meant to promote helpful comments. Hopefully, YouTube’s imitation of X will extend to making notes available in a downloadable format.

A lot of work will have to go into making these notes useful. A helpful note, YouTube writes, "cites high-quality sources." YouTube will hope its users define high quality the same way as Google’s guidelines, but that’s a tall order. Just yesterday a preprint dropped analyzing the sources used in Birdwatch. Turns out the single most cited source is…Twitter.

The incentive structure will also be crucial. X's notes have been largely driven by counterpartisans eager to correct their ideological adversaries. Unless YouTube does something dramatically different, I expect this will happen in Viewer Notes too.

Still, it’s a worthwhile experiment that I’ll be following closely.